Red carpet for Putin, empty hands for the West – Europe must hold the line

I told him it would unfold exactly as most people are predicting, which was a massive PR victory for Vladimir Putin, while the West would walk away empty-handed. The only thing Putin offered in return was his hardline stance that Ukraine must be annihilated, as he continued to reference the “root causes” of the war.

The contrast could not have been more striking: Vladimir Putin was welcomed with a red-carpet reception in Alaska on Friday, while just months earlier, Donald Trump was sparring with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.

After weeks of Trump demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine, his administration now appears to be the only side making concessions, announcing that Washington will no longer insist on a ceasefire, but will work towards a peace deal.

The Kremlin stuck to its guns and is seemingly making the exact same demands as it had been in 2022.

As a result, Putin walked away from the Alaska summit as the clear winner. By pretending to engage in talks and floating unrealistic proposals, the Kremlin has managed to turn the tables and push blame toward Kyiv. It’s a tactic that has worked repeatedly since the start of Trump’s administration.

As a former KGB man, Putin flatters Trump with praise, carefully leveraging the relationship to draw him closer to Moscow’s line. The cycle has become familiar over the past months. Trump soon shifts the blame for the war onto Biden and Zelensky. One Ukrainian intelligence officer said Trump was “unbelievably aggressive” in trying to pressure Kyiv to give away territory to the invading Russians.

Steve Witkoff claimed Putin agreed to “game-changing” commitments, Rubio emphasized that the details remain unsettled. Pressed on what concessions Moscow would actually make, Witkoff said Russia “agreed on enshrining legislatively language” to not attack Ukraine again – a promise eerily similar to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

That agreement saw Ukraine give up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of sovereignty, only to watch Russia later trample those assurances when it invaded in 2014. Andrei Kozyrev, Russia’s former foreign minister, highlighted that Putin has already violated multiple legal treaties between Ukraine and Russia, including one that he signed in 2003.

In his response, Zelensky pointed out these exact issues such as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, 2014 Annexation of Crimea, and the subsequent invasion of Donbas. Kyiv knows that the Russians cannot be trusted to honour any agreement and will only respond to strength. Rewarding aggression with concessions will not bring peace, but rather invite even greater acts of aggression in the future. Ukraine knows that all too well.

Following the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Putin had become a pariah on the international stage, hell-bent on destroying Ukraine. Now Russia is deep into the fourth year of its war, with more than a million casualties. Kyiv, meanwhile, has built a steel “porcupine” defense that Moscow has so far failed to break.

Ukraine’s “drone wall” has turned the front into a costly war of attrition for Russia’s army. Since Ukraine’s counteroffensives stalled in November 2022, Russia has gained less than 1% of territory, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. One Russian commentator said, “They [Ukrainians] dug in, sit there, we attack and they use those FPVs and... kill us. That's the paradigm of this war. In this war it's not advantageous to be in offense.”

Faced with these losses, Moscow wants to extract whatever it can from negotiations to help its army on the battlefield. This is why the Kremlin is pressing for Ukraine to hand over the rest of Donetsk Oblast as part of a peace agreement. The region contains Ukraine’s strongest fortifications, and any attempt by Russia to capture it outright would be extremely costly in manpower and resources.

Fueled by oil and gas revenues, the Kremlin continues to bankroll lucrative payouts, sending wave after wave of soldiers to die in daily assaults on Ukrainian cities. If Putin feels there is no price to pay for his invasion, he will continue to wage war. And until much greater economic costs are imposed on Moscow, the Russians don’t have an incentive for any real peace agreement.

European leaders already understand this reality too. French President Emmanuel Macron echoed this sentiment, saying, "I believe he wants Ukraine’s surrender" and that Putin doesn’t want peace.

Yet the Kremlin believes that with enough time and relentless battlefield pressure, Ukraine could eventually be forced to fold and accept Russian demands. For Putin’s war planners, the challenge is sustaining the war machine while keeping the economy from overheating under the weight of sanctions and military spending.

That is why the stakes for Europe are higher than ever. At this stage, Europe must demonstrate that it is prepared to escalate both military aid for Ukraine and economic pressure on Russia, regardless of Washington’s position.

The danger is that the Trump administration could corner Kyiv into accepting a flawed deal that rewards Moscow, giving Russia time to regroup, rearm, and prepare for an even larger war down the road. The Kremlin’s aim is clear: drag Europe back into the 19th century and, in Putin’s mind, restore Russia as a global superpower – a goal that can only be achieved by first subjugating Ukraine.

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David Kirichenko is a war correspondent and researcher specialising in irregular warfare and military strategy and is reporting from Ukraine.

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